The Breaking Point Part 67

"I understand. But she wouldn't, d.i.c.k."

"No. I don't suppose she would."

He went away soon after that, back to the quiet house and to David.

Automatically he turned in at his office, but Reynolds was writing there. He went slowly up the stairs.

Ann Sayre was frankly puzzled during the next few days. She had had a week or so of serenity and antic.i.p.ation, and although things were not quite as she would have had them, Elizabeth too impa.s.sive and even Wallie rather restrained in his happiness, she was satisfied. But d.i.c.k Livingstone's return had somehow changed everything.

It had changed Wallie, too. He was suddenly a man, and not, she suspected, a very happy man. He came back one day, for instance, to say that he had taken a partnership in a brokerage office, and gave as his reason that he was sick of "playing round." She rather thought it was to take his mind off something.

A few days after the funeral she sent for Doctor Reynolds. "I caught cold at the cemetery," she said, when he had arrived and was seated opposite her in her boudoir. "I really did," she protested, as she caught his eye. "I suppose everybody is sending for you, to have a chance to talk."

"Just about."

"You can't blame us. Particularly, you can't blame me. I've got to know something, doctor. Is he going to stay?"

"I think so. Yes."

"Isn't he going to explain anything? He can't expect just to walk back into his practise after all these months, and the talk that's been going on, and do nothing about it."

"I don't see what his going away has to do with it. He's a good doctor, and a hard worker. When I'm gone--"

"You're going, are you?"

"Yes. I may live here, and have an office in the city. I don't care for general practise; there's no future in it. I may take a special course in nose and throat."

But she was not interested in his plans.

"I want to know something, and only you can tell me. I'm not curious like the rest; I think I have a right to know. Has he seen Elizabeth Wheeler yet? Talked to her, I mean?"

"I don't know. I'm inclined to think not," he added cautiously.

"You mean that he hasn't?"

"Look here, Mrs. Sayre. You've confided in me, and I know it's important to you. I don't know a thing. I'm to stay on until the end of the week, and then he intends to take hold. I'm in and out, see him at meals, and we've had a little desultory talk. There is no trouble between the two families. Mr. Wheeler comes and goes. If you ask me, I think Livingstone has simply accepted the situation as he found it."

"He isn't going to explain anything? He'll have to, I think, if he expects to practise here. There have been all sorts of stories."

"I don't know, Mrs. Sayre."

"How is Doctor David?" she asked, after a pause.

"Better. It wouldn't surprise me now to see him mend rapidly."

He met Elizabeth on his way down the hill, a strange, bright-eyed Elizabeth, carrying her head high and a bit too jauntily, and with a sort of hot defiance in her eyes. He drove on, thoughtfully. All this turmoil and trouble, anxiety and fear, and all that was left a crushed and tragic figure of a girl, and two men in an old house, preparing to fight that one of them might regain the place he had lost.

It would be a fight. Reynolds saw the village already divided into two camps, a small militant minority, aligned with d.i.c.k and David, and a waiting, not particularly hostile but intensely curious majority, who would demand certain things before d.i.c.k's reinstatement in their confidence.

Elizabeth Wheeler was an unconscious party to the division. It was, in a way, her battle they were fighting. And Elizabeth had gone over to the enemy.

Late that afternoon Ann Sayre had her first real talk with Wallie since d.i.c.k's return. She led him out onto the terrace, her shoulders militant and her head high, and faced him there.

"I can see you are not going to talk to me," she said. "So I'll talk to you. Has d.i.c.k Livingstone's return made any change between Elizabeth and you?"

"No."

"She's just the same to you? You must tell me, Wallace. I've been building so much."

She realized the change in him then more fully than ever for he faced her squarely and without evasion.

"There's no change in her, mother, but I think you and I will both have to get used to this: she's not in love with me. She doesn't pretend to be."

"Don't tell me it's still that man!"

"I don't know." He took a turn or two about the terrace. "I don't think it is, mother. I don't think she cares for anybody, that way, certainly not for me. And that's the trouble." He faced her again. "If marrying me isn't going to make her happy, I won't hold her to it. You'll have to support me in that, mother. I'm a pretty weak sister sometimes."

That appeal touched her as nothing had done for a long time. "I'll help all I can, if the need comes," she said, and turned and went heavily into the house.

XLVII

David was satisfied. The great love of his life had been given to d.i.c.k, and now d.i.c.k was his again. He grieved for Lucy, but he knew that the parting was not for long, and that from whatever high place she looked down she would know that. He was satisfied. He looked on his work and found it good. There was no trace of weakness nor of vacillation in the man who sat across from him at the table, or slammed in and out of the house after his old fashion.

But he was not content. At first it was enough to have d.i.c.k there, to stop in the doorway of his room and see him within, occupied with the prosaic business of getting into his clothes or out of them, now and then to put a hand on his shoulder, to hear him fussing in the laboratory again, and to be called to examine divers and sundry smears to which d.i.c.k attached impressive importance and more impressive names.

But behind d.i.c.k's surface cheerfulness he knew that he was eating his heart out.

And there was nothing to be done. Nothing. Secretly David watched the papers for the announcement of Elizabeth's engagement, and each day drew a breath of relief when it did not come. And he had done another thing secretly, too; he did not tell d.i.c.k when her ring came back. Annie had brought the box, without a letter, and the incredible cruelty of the thing made David furious. He stamped into his office and locked it in a drawer, with the definite intention of saving d.i.c.k that one additional pang at a time when he already had enough to hear.

For things were going very badly. The fight was on.

It was a battle without action. Each side was dug in and entrenched, and waiting. It was an engagement where the princ.i.p.als met occasionally the neutral ground of the streets, bowed to each other and pa.s.sed on.

The town was sorry for David and still fond of him, but it resented his stiff-necked att.i.tude. It said, in effect, that when he ceased to make d.i.c.k's enemies his it was willing to be friends. But it said also, to each other and behind its hands, that d.i.c.k's absence was discreditable or it would be explained, and that he had behaved abominably to Elizabeth. It would be hanged if it would be friends with him.

It looked away, but it watched. d.i.c.k knew that when he pa.s.sed by on the streets it peered at him from behind its curtains, and whispered behind his back. Now and then he saw, on his evening walks, that line of cars drawn up before houses he had known and frequented which indicated a party, but he was never asked. He never told David.

It was only when the taboo touched David that d.i.c.k was resentful, and then he was inclined to question the wisdom of his return. It hurt him, for instance, to see David give up his church, and reading morning prayer alone at home on Sunday mornings, and to see his grim silence when some of his old friends were mentioned.

Yet on the surface things were much as they had been. David rose early, and as he improved in health, read his morning paper in his office while he waited for breakfast. Doctor Reynolds had gone, and the desk in d.i.c.k's office was back where it belonged. In the mornings Mike oiled the car in the stable and washed it, his old pipe clutched in his teeth, while from the kitchen came the sounds of pans and dishes, and the odor of frying sausages. And d.i.c.k splashed in the shower, and shaved by the mirror with the cracked gla.s.s in the bathroom. But he did not sing.

The house was very quiet. Now and then the front door opened, and a patient came in, but there was no longer the crowded waiting-room, the incessant jangle of the telephone, the odor of pungent drugs and antiseptics.

When, shortly before Christmas, d.i.c.k looked at the books containing the last quarter's accounts, he began to wonder how long they could fight their losing battle. He did not mind for himself, but it was unthinkable that David should do without, one by one, the small luxuries of his old age, his cigars, his long and now errandless rambles behind Nettie.

He began then to think of his property, his for the claiming, and to question whether he had not bought his peace at too great a cost to David. He knew by that time that it was not fear, but pride, which had sent him back empty-handed, the pride of making his own way. And now and then, too, he felt a perfectly human desire to let Ba.s.sett publish the story as his vindication and then s.n.a.t.c.h David away from them all, to some luxurious haven where--that was the point at which he always stopped--where David could pine away in homesickness for them!